Lessons in Crime is a pretty recent collection from the British Library Crime Classics series, edited as usual by Martin Edwards. Unsurprisingly, this one focuses on mystery stories set in academic settings -- schools, weekend courses, and of course, universities. 

There are some big names here -- Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle -- and some lesser-known ones, along with ones that are familiar to me from these anthologies, such as E.W. Hornung. As ever, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: I'm not a huge fan of Reggie Fortune and A.J. Raffles as characters, but in a collection like this, it all adds up to a feel for how writers viewed and used these settings, the trends in the stories, etc.

I was a little surprised by the heavy anti-Welsh sentiment in one of the stories: it's been a while since I met that kind of thing so openly. (The Welsh character mutates ps and bs in English, lies habitually, etc, etc; we're in "Taffy was a Welshman" territory.) I know the British Library Crime Classics series typically doesn't edit this sort of thing out, and they do say so in a preface -- they present the stories as part of their historical context, as well as for entertainment. But it was a little surprising, all the same.

A nicer surprise was a story by Jacqueline Wilson -- yes, that one! Her earliest works were crime stories, and one of her short stories is included here to round out the volume with a recent story.

Overall, a collection I enjoyed!